The main issue that I worked on this sprint was the implementation of UUID as well as the use of bcrypt encryption algorithms to hash and store it in the database. This issue required me to rework most of the codebase: api, endpoints, CRUD functionality, and tests. There is still one test that I wasn’t able to pass, not 100% sure why. – https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/commit/cab7ee9496f3b0ec7f895153869de9fb6ded7def

Compared to the previous sprint, this sprint went a lot smoother and the team as able to finish their tasks/issues to an extent. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to fully implement features like role checking and accessing UUID from Keycloak tokens, due to these tasks depending on another team’s completion of implementing Keycloak. Nevertheless, as the semester was coming to an end, the team felt stronger due to better communication and everyone was determined to not only finish their task but also help one another if they required it. Some areas that the team could improve on was better communication with other teams. Since the role checking task was dependent on another team, it required us to have consistent communication, which we lacked. As a scrum master, I could have improved with pushing for more communication between the teams, especially when there seemed to be frustrations. Overall, as a team we did well in effectively presenting our semesters work and suggesting future work for future semesters. I personally enjoyed working with the Thea’s Pantry codebase because it gave me experience with full-stack development and allowed me to explore new concepts like proxies and data encryption. Additionally, this project allowed me to gain experience with valuable frameworks and tools like Vue.js, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and Mocha Chai. After working with both frontend and backend, I can confidently say that I prefer backend development more than frontend.

If I had to choose just one Apprenticeship Pattern, it would be “Share What You Learn”. This habit says to routinely share something you’ve learned, whether that be on a blog or amongst your friends. To quote, “Being part of a community of individuals where both learning on your own and humbly sharing that newly acquired knowledge are valued is one of the most powerful aspects of apprenticeship”. Fostering an environment where you’re eager to learn is essential in the tech industry that’s constantly evolving. It enables you to change your perspective about learning as a whole; viewing it as an opportunity to grow. Because I was working outside my comfort-zone, I often found myself sharing what I was working and things I was learning with my teammates. I especially shared when I was encountering errors with my docker compose or the repository because it allowed us to think about why there were errors and helped my teammates avoid having the same problems. If I had read the pattern before the sprint, I would have likely shared more because it not only allows you to reflect on what you’ve learned but also makes your team more knowledgeable, even if they themselves haven’t learned/experienced it first-hand.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Through a Senior by Winston Luu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 3 served as a continuation and deepening of the progress made in Sprint 2, with a clearer focus on finalizing core system transitions and significantly improving communication within our team. While Sprint 2 did not meet all of our productivity goals, it provided valuable insight into our workflow and highlighted areas for improvement. Those lessons helped us enter Sprint 3 better prepared, with more defined objectives and a more collaborative mindset.

In this sprint, we concentrated on three primary technical tasks. First, we transitioned the identification system from WSUID to UUID, which is a major improvement in terms of data consistency and security. Second, we continued modifying the backend endpoints to verify user authorization based on roles by utilizing access tokens. Third, we enhanced the RabbitMQ messaging system by adding a message block that includes the operation date, operation type, and guest object information. This change improves both tracking and reporting for system activities, which is essential for reporting purposes.

Work was divided evenly among team members, continuing our strength in distributing tasks effectively based on each person’s strengths and areas of focus. Sean and Hiercine worked closely together on refining backend logic, ensuring that endpoints were properly validating access tokens and enforcing functionality restrictions based on user roles. Lynn and Winston concentrated on updating every relevant system component to remove WSUID references and replace them with UUIDs, improving data security and system reliability. I focused on extending the RabbitMQ functionality, implementing the logic needed to include operation data in each message, which adds valuable structure to the reports

One of our ongoing strengths, which became even more evident during this sprint, was our collaboration. Despite having distinct tasks, we consistently looked for ways to assist one another. Whether it was through peer code reviews, giving advice, or helping debug issues, we embraced a team-oriented mindset. This aligns with the “Rubbing Elbows” pattern as working in close proximity and staying connected to one another’s progress. This type of collaboration helped us move faster, avoid duplicated effort, and maintain a shared understanding of the system as a whole.

However, we did face some obstacles. Certain tasks took longer than expected due to knowledge gaps, particularly as we learned to implement unfamiliar technologies. Additionally, our progress was partially blocked by dependencies on another team. We had to wait for them to finish implementing their check-role functionality, which was necessary for Sean and Hiercine’s role validation work and for me to complete the RabbitMQ enhancements. This highlighted the importance of coordination in multi-team environments.

Despite these delays, we remained in a strong position to complete the project successfully. If anything, Sprint 3 revealed the importance of proactive communication both within our own team and with external stakeholders like our professor or other teams. Increasing updates internally and with the professor might have reduced these blocks.

Overall, Sprint 3 reflected meaningful progress not just in terms of deliverables but also in our development as a team. We grew more confident, more skilled, and more collaborative, all of which are essential traits we’ll carry with us into our future work in the tech industry.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Giovanni Casiano – Software Development by Giovanni Casiano and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This sprint, my colleague and I focused on improving the security of our user identification process by applying the bcrypt algorithm to hash user UUIDs. This enhancement ensures that sensitive user data is protected, even if our data storage were to be compromised. Gitlab activity included integrating bcrypt hashing into the backend to hash user UUIDs using a cost factor of 10, modifying bcrypt configuration to use a fixed salt, ensuring consistent hashes across runs, and submitting final changes to incorporate one-way hashing of UUIDs into the main codebase. Collaboration was a strong point during this sprint. My teammate and I divided the responsibilities clearly: while I explored and tested the technical implementation of bcrypt, they focused on integrating the updated code into the overall architecture and ensuring compatibility with existing endpoints. The decision to use a cost factor of 10 proved ideal, it gave us a reasonable level of security without compromising performance. Our communication also worked well. We checked in frequently and held short meetings to keep each other up to speed. As a result, we were able to rapidly troubleshoot issues and make decisions quickly, like choosing to use a fixed salt instead of a randomly generated one to produce consistent UUID hashes.

One issue we ran into was a lack of documentation around the UUID hashing logic. Initially, we assumed the random salt provided by bcrypt would be fine, but after seeing inconsistent hash outputs during tests, we realized the need for a predictable result. This led to a mid-sprint pivot toward using a fixed salt. We had to backtrack, re-implement, and update our test cases, which took us some time. This could have been avoided with better planning. Additionally, we ran into some confusion around git merge conflicts when integrating our changes into the main branch. While we resolved them, it highlighted the need for more careful branch management and communication before pushing large updates. As a team, we could benefit from implementing a more structured approach to testing and reviewing security features. If we had written our unit tests alongside the feature development instead of afterward, we could have caught edge cases and salt inconsistencies earlier. Pair programming or doing short walk-throughs of each other’s code before merging would also help with smoother integration. We also realized the importance of having centralized documentation. Creating a shared sprint wiki or README update plan could help future developers (and our future selves) understand our design decisions, especially when it comes to something nuanced like hashing algorithms.

Personally, I’d like to improve on anticipating the implications of the tools I use. Initially, I took for granted that bcrypt’s built-in salting behavior was the best option without considering how it would affect UUID. Doing more research ahead of implementation or even reaching out for guidance from more experienced developers, could have saved us time. I also want to get more comfortable with conflict resolution in Git. While I understand the basics, more practice and familiarity with rebase, stash, and other tools would make collaboration smoother. In Apprenticeship Patterns, the pattern “Dig Deeper” encourages developers to go beyond surface-level understanding and truly learn the underlying mechanics of a technology. It’s about investigating not just how something works, but whyit works that way. I chose this pattern because it reflects exactly what I failed to do at the start of this sprint. When I implemented bcrypt, I understood it hashed securely, but I didn’t dig into how it used salt or how to configure it for consistent output. Had I taken the time to explore bcrypt’s inner workings, I would have realized the random salt would cause each hash to differ and planned for a fixed salt approach from the start. If I had read and applied “Dig Deeper” earlier in the sprint, I believe our implementation would have been more efficient and less prone to last-minute changes. This pattern reinforces the importance of understanding the tools we depend on.

References.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/143

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/guestinfosystem/guestinfobackend/-/issues/142

From the blog CS@Worcester – Lynn'sBlogs by lynnnsubuga and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The third and final sprint of our semester was eventful and successful for our team. We made great progress on many of our major tasks. It was a relatively smooth sprint with only a few resolvable issues. Our communication was on point, and we remained entirely transparent about our goals for the sprint. The focus of this sprint was finishing the guest info system’s installation and setting up subsystems as we went forward. We successfully worked with another team to fix the formatting on the guest info system and we now have a stable build. Our team also completed port mapping, and created a table for our ports. We also have a working landing page (missing Keycloak) and the beginning of a working weight-based inventory system. We set fair and manageable goals throughout this sprint, and prepared the next teem excellently for the tasks to come. We are fully pushed to gitlab with all our important information, and we have documentation to guide future teams. I spent my time doing three major tasks; getting the guest info system working fully, researching different ways to handle multiple docker compose files, and beginning work on the weight-based inventory sub-system.

What I thought didn’t work well in the sprint was the time crunch on our issues. While we made great progress, due to the upcoming presentations and end of the class we did not finish as much as we’d have liked. We left some tasks incomplete to a minor degree, although we are proud and happy with the work we made. I would personally have liked to finish the inventory sub-system. I was unable to do that due to time constraints at the end of the semester. We were working on getting the guest info system working up until that point. 

As a team our biggest weakness is our shared lack of knowledge in the subject, requiring us to pool our brains for certain tasks. While we worked independently to a great degree in this Sprint (an improvement from the last two sprints), I feel that due to the complexity of our tasks, we did not adequately work independently where we could have. A lot of time in my opinion was lost to this communal working, although we did get farther than expected with the sprint. As an individual I could improve better at communicating my work. During team work class I am not immediately vocal with what I am working on, and although I am making progress I am not being entirely transparent with my team. Going into future work I will be more transparent with my work, having learned from this experience.

The apprenticeship pattern that best describes my work in this sprint is Walking The Long Road. I felt that this fit because of the work I was doing throughout this sprint. While I could have stopped coding and cleaned up with more clerical work, I continued to remain persistent with adding features and improving our server. This led me to research merging docker compose files and adding the inventory system, which became an excellent end-of-sprint addition. Teams in the future will benefit from this addition, as they will have an easy portion to implement into the server to get their feet wet. By remaining consistent at improving my abilities, I avoided resting on my laurels and considering the job done before it had been completed.

My tasks:
https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/deployment/gitlab-profile/-/issues/25
This was my earliest task, involving fixing the disconnecting backend. Working with Professor Wurst and Cameron, this was completed.

https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/deployment/gitlab-profile/-/issues/10 

This was my major task for this Sprint. I spent time making sure the guest info system was running smoothly, as well as adding new subsystems to test towards the end of the sprint. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – WSU CS Blog: Ben Gelineau by Ben Gelineau and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For my final apprenticeship pattern, I wanted to find one with a message that I could take with me into my future work with software development that would continue to help me improve after my academic career has ended, as well as even years into a professional career. Chapter 5’s Expand your Bandwidth touches on this topic, and explains how one can expand their knowledge beyond the context of what is needed in a specific project or job.

With regards to experience and knowledge, the two common pitfalls a developer can find themselves in are having only an understanding of the tools needed for their specific role, and only possessing a surface level understanding of the knowledge they have. Personally, I believe that these two problems have the same root cause; when you only concern yourself with what you need to know for your work, your knowledge stagnates and you exclude yourself from experiences that would improve your craftsmanship.

The book places emphasis on the value of the desire to go further and learn more in unique and unfamiliar ways. The common examples of attending professional development and technical conferences and events, as well as using online courses and videos about new topics, are present. However, the idea of looking through forums and mailing lists to find other people’s problems and replicating them to solve them, was a new one for me. Of course I’ve used sites like StackOverflow before, so I knew that this was something one could do, but I hadn’t realized the value it had in improving my own knowledge.

Expand your Bandwidth begins with a quote from Jim Highsmith, author of Agile Software Development Ecosystems:

“Learning about what we don’t know is often more important than doing things we already know how to do.”

A great way to summarize the value of going the extra mile to learn more, and a message I want to keep in my mind for my future in software development.

In our final sprint, I focused on the integration between the database containing the visit info and the backend code we’ve developed to generate the report. This meant refactoring the backend code to accept and parse data from RabbitMQ, as well as handling the connection itself. The connection between RabbitMQ and the backend has been causing issues, and needs further debugging work before it can be deployed.

Reflecting on the sprint as a whole, I’m not completely satisfied with my own work. The original plan had been to develop testing for the backend code during the sprint, which I spent two weeks working on before deciding the connection between the database and backend was more critical to the functionality of the project, and needed priority. Compounded with the problems that arose during development and debugging, I wasn’t able to finish the work within the duration of the sprint. I believe choosing at first to work on testing was a mistake on my part, and that poor planning contributed to not meeting the goals my team had set. However, I also believe that the work that was done on the backend code was productive and is very close to completion. For future work, I want to improve my planning and time management by allotting myself some time during the sprint planning as extra time, in case a feature or issue ends up taking longer than anticipated. This way, I will be able to afford setbacks such as those that occurred this sprint.

Link to updated most recent commit

From the blog Griffin Butler Computer Science Blog by Griffin Butler and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.